Sucker Punch lays off 24 staff after Ghost of Yōtei Complete Edition launch

Sucker Punch Productions has cut 24 employees, according to a former staff member, weeks after shipping Ghost of Yōtei: Complete Edition — a layoff round the Bellevue studio attributes to "challenges in the market" and staffing needs for its next project.

The number comes from a former employee; the reasoning comes from an internal email obtained by Aftermath. In it, the Ghost of Yōtei developer said it "decided to make some staffing reductions" after "carefully observing the challenges in the market and reviewing the team needs for [its] next project."

Management acknowledged the weight of the move. "We know this is a lot to take in, and we want to assure you that we did not make this decision lightly," the email stated. It added: "We have given this a lot of attention and worked to support our affected colleagues during this transition as well as we can [...] There's no getting around that this is a hard day. Next week we will go into more details about the future."

GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sucker Punch's parent since 2011, for comment.

Layoffs despite a commercial hit

What does this change for PlayStation's first-party ecosystem? On paper, very little points to trouble at the studio. Ghost of Yōtei, the sequel to 2020's Ghost of Tsushima, launched last October and sold 3.3 million copies in its first month, surpassing Tsushima's sales over the comparable period.

GSD data (a European physical and digital sell-through tracker) shows Yōtei was Sony's largest first-party PlayStation launch in Europe to date. The title "significantly contributed" to Sony's Q3 results, where digital game and add-on content revenue rose 6% to $4.8 billion.

Sucker Punch has kept the game alive post-launch. A multiplayer mode arrived in March, and earlier this month the studio released a complete edition bundling a single-player narrative expansion.

The context that matters

A hit game no longer guarantees headcount stability. The internal email's framing — market challenges plus the shape of the next project — mirrors language used across the industry's 2023-2025 reduction cycle, where studios restructure teams around new production phases regardless of prior commercial performance.

The affected roles weren't specified, nor whether the cuts concentrate in live-ops staff following Yōtei's content cadence. The promise of "more details about the future" next week suggests the studio will outline its next project's direction — and, implicitly, the headcount it requires.

Watch for Sony's response to the comment request and for next week's internal follow-up, which should clarify whether this is a one-off realignment or the first signal of a larger restructure at one of PlayStation's most reliably profitable studios.